Companies, particularly in the finance, insurance, and healthcare fields, record some or all of the telephone conversations between their employees and their clients for evidence in case of a dispute. For example, a stock brokerage company may record thousands of conversations a year, mainly the details of customer transactions conducted over the telephone, to ensure that the execution of the customers' orders are consistent with the customers' spoken orders. It has become increasingly important for corporations to keep track of communications between employees and between employees and the corporation's customers and/or the public. The requirements of the SEC, NASD, HWAA, Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and various anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws put further pressure on corporations to have the ability to monitor, record, archive, index, retrieve, and control employee communications.
Traditionally, such conversations are recorded as voice/sound recordings on various recording media. Such conversations can also then be associated with individual customer records and retrieved if necessary. Recently, compression techniques have been put to use in order to decrease the amount of recording media required to capture and archive such recordings.
Voice data presents many challenges and problems to companies who plan to use it for reasons of compliance and content control. In order to locate recordings of telephone conversations with potentially non-compliant language, it would require near real-time playback while someone listens for the non-compliant language. It also makes it very difficult to monitor or identify compliance violations prior to a complaint. In the case of a complaint, the complainant would provide the approximate time and date which would narrow the scope of the search. Monitoring conversations for non-compliant language requires near real-time monitoring of all conversations. This takes considerable time, effort and cost.
It is very difficult for companies to keep track of employee telephone conversations because telephone conversations have substantial storage requirements and are difficult and time consuming to analyze for non-compliant communication and language, or a particular communication.
Many companies now use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks to place and receive telephonic communications rather than solely using the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN.) In VoIP networks, telephone voice conversations are converted to data that is compatible with IP networks. Once converted, the data can be switched and routed as any network data. When conversations are recorded, they are stored as voice messages that must be processed manually to determine whether they contain non-compliant communication and language, or a particular communication. Such processing is expensive and time-consuming, requiring considerable human intervention.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for monitoring, recording, archiving, indexing, retrieving, processing, and managing communications in the form of voice messages.